The early days of the Internet spawned
a slew of cheerleaders and enthusiasts. Although overboard
pronouncements – like those that foresaw the Dow Jones
Industrial Average reaching 30,000 – are long forgotten,
we tend to lose sight of the dramatic impact Internet technology
has had on the public relations profession. At the risk of
being mistaken for a naïve cheerleader, I’d venture
to say some of the changes are indeed revolutionary.
In this piece, I’ll point out how technology is changing
the pr profession, changes which pr people ignore to their peril.
Let me define my starting point. Picture the good old days
when the two arms of public relations typically involved separate
activities often managed by separate people in the same department.
The first arm – community relations – had to do
with reaching out directly to the intended audience –
whether members, customers or the general public. The second
– media relations – involved communicating with
news organizations in the hopes that your information would
be incorporated into their content.
Community relations revolved around events,
such as ribbon cuttings, charity auctions, speaking engagements
and the like, where your company came in direct contact with
the public. Media relations typically meant issuing a press
release, which had to be printed, folded, stuffed into an
envelope and then mailed to your trusty media list.
Along came computers and then the Internet and as a result,
today few people mail out a press release and keeping a website
up-to-date is now an important part of community relations.
Other than increasing the workload,
how have those changes impacted what PR professionals do?
It may be obvious, but I’ll bet many of you underestimate
the impact of the fact that the public can now read your press
releases. In the past only your boss and the media read your
releases. Today, assuming you post them to your website, your
releases are available to a number of new constituencies –
employees, prospects, clients, vendors, competitors as well
as the general public.
Do you truly consider the fact that your all these audiences
can read your releases as you write them? If not, maybe you
should.
Second, have you considered how much community relations has
blended into media relations as a result of the Internet?
Today, the public can learn more about your organization than
ever before – whether from your website or links found
by conducting a search on Google, which may taken them to
information that you can’t control. Shareholders for
example can find information faster and easier which means
investors relations people have to be on their toes.
Further, the Internet has changed the shelf-life
of your press releases and web pages. In the past a press
release had a very short existence. It was either used or
trashed. Now, links to releases from five years ago may still
be on your website, and if not, they could be indexed in a
search engine database, which means someone can find those
links and possibly the releases – even if they are no
longer on your website.
How many of you recognize the potential problems of not removing
old or corrected pages from your web server? If you don’t
remove old pages and press releases that do not reflect who
you are today those documents can be found and their impact
can be problematic.
At first blush fax machines and email seemed to make things
easier and for a while they did, but as is the case with much
of technology – think of the cellphone for example –
we’ve reached a point where the pendulum has swung back
in the other direction.
Take fax machines. Remember when the New York Times and other
media stopped giving out their fax number because they were
getting bombarded and didn’t like paying for all that
paper? Plus when you send a fax to a general number you have
no idea of who sees it – even if you put a cover sheet
on it.
No sooner did you get settled using fax when along came email.
But email has its own problems. Spam filters and the volume
of emails like the volume of faxes in the past may mean your
email won’t get through or if it does, because of the
volume factor the intended recipient may not get to it right
away.
The same scenario is mirrored with
the Internet.
Today there are multiple ways to communicate directly your
target audiences that you did not have in the past. In fact,
in the past the news media was a necessary evil. Without it,
the cost of communicating directly to any audience was very
expensive. Today you can by-pass the media and go directly
to your audience by posting documents on your website, making
sure that they are indexed by search engines, and emailing
your releases to anyone whose email you can capture.
However, getting into a search engine database requires your
site to be spidered by that search engine which may mean re-submitting
your site, and getting your releases indexed by a search engine
is not the same thing as their being indexed by a news aggregator.
(A news aggregator captures content and repackages it or subjects
it to a search algorithm meant to make it more accessible
to the customer.)
Bottom line? Releases posted to your website may be found
on Google, but they won’t automatically show up on Google
News. Stories written from your releases that were posted
to certain media websites, however, will…which takes
us back to how do you get the media to use your releases?
Search engines and news aggregators are
not the only opportunity for pushing your content to the general
public. Other channels include bloggers, websites that selectively
post news stories about, or of interest, to their members/subscribers,
RSS readers, webcasting, and let’s not forget email.
That’s the good news, but it’s also the bad news
in that there’s a learning curve involved in mastering
each of these technologies. Plus, more ways to deliver content,
just like more television channels, only means your audience
is being splintered into finer and finer segments, making
it harder and harder to reach them.
New technology creates new opportunities,
and for a while, can make life easier. But, technological
change also creates new challenges and can increase our workload.
And so the revolution continues. Technology
changes expectations as well as behavior, forcing service
providers to improve their offerings which in turn feeds the
cycle until it seems that there’s a revolution in how
things are done every six months.
PR professionals I talk to still complain about not having
enough time and being overwhelmed by the amount of information
they are required to manage while having to learn how to operate
PDAs, code web pages and create blogs.
Good or bad that trend will continue. To
keep up pr professionals should not be shy in asking their
service providers to provide a range of integrated communications
and information management tools. Good companies want to hear
from their customers because they understand the revolution
is just beginning.
Peter G. Pollak is the
founder and current serves as chairman of Empire Information
Services, Inc. (EIS). EIS has provided press release distribution
services to government agencies, private businesses, associations,
non-profit institutions, political campaigns and other news
sources since 1986. Prior to founding EIS, Pollak was editor
of two weekly newspapers and earned a Ph.D. in history and
education from the University at Albany.
Email: ppollak@eisinc.com
Company Profile:
Empire Information Services Inc
Company URL:
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